Synopsis of the Cutting Edge Course Design Tutorial

Developed by Barbara J. Tewksbury (Hamilton College) and R. Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary)

Our face-to-face Course Design Workshops have helped hundreds of faculty members design effective and innovative courses over the past decade. We now have an Online Course Design Tutorial that guides you independently through the same practical and intellectually interesting process that our workshop participants experience.

This web page provides a short synopsis of the key elements in our course design process. We hope that you are intrigued enough to explore and use the full Online Course Design Tutorial.

Overall philosophy

We believe that a course should do more than provide students with a strong background of knowledge in a field.

We believe that a course should enable students to use their strong backgrounds to solve problems.

A truly valuable course should focus beyond the final exam to add to students' future lives, abilities and skill sets and prepare students to think for themselves in the discipline after the course is over.

Designing such a course is a challenge and involves providing not only opportunities for students to master content but also opportunities for students to practice thinking for themselves in the discipline so that they will be prepared to do so after the course is over.

Our Tutorial provides a process to help you design just such a course.

The design process

Course context. Teaching a course involves making choices about what an instructor will ask students to do and why. External factors such as course size, context, student demography, and support structure are significant and should influence the choices that need to be made during course design. We begin the design process by having you articulate who your students are, what they need during the course, and what they might need in the future.

Setting overarching goals. The heart of our course design process involves having you set student-focused goals that enable your students, at an appropriate level, to think for themselves in the discipline, not just expose them to what professionals know. You will set goals that focus your course on developing students' abilities to think for themselves and solve problems in the discipline while still addressing mastery of content.

analyze the modern geologic processes in an unfamiliar area and assess potential hazards to humans (which is different from recalling those covered in class).

evaluate the historical context of an unfamiliar event.

access and analyze climate and paleoclimate data sets in various formats (tabulated, graphical, simple strat. column, satellite photo, etc.) and make logical inferences about climate and environmental change from the data.

analyze an unfamiliar epidemic.

develop and test age-appropriate lesson plans.

use data from recent Mars missions to re-evaluate pre-2004 hypotheses about Mars geologic processes and history/evolution

predict the outcome of ____

research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate analyses to someone else

find and evaluate information/data on ____

Setting ancillary skills goals. Before proceeding to content and course plan, you will set one or two ancillary skills goals for your students (e.g., improving writing, teamwork, oral presentation).

Choosing content to achieve overarching goals. Every field is awash in more than a semester's worth of content, and every one of us faces decisions about what content to include and what content to omit. You will make decisions about content by considering what general content topics could be used to achieve the overarching goals you have set for your students, rather than by making a laundry list of content that students should be exposed to.

Developing a course plan. A course plan includes not only the goals and the content topics, but also the order of content and concepts in each broad content topic, and how students will receive goal-related practice with increasing independence as they encounter content and concepts. You will choose appropriate classroom, assignment, and assessment strategies that both help students learn effectively and allow you to evaluate whether students have met the goals.

NAGT is seeking a qualified person to serve as the Association's Executive Director to begin August 2019.

NAGT's mission is to support a diverse, inclusive, and thriving community of educators and education researchers to improve teaching and learning about the Earth. NAGT represents the collective voice of K-12 teachers, college and university faculty, and informal educators in museums and science centers who share a vision to build geoscience expertise and an Earth-literate society through high-quality education. We seek an exceptional Executive Director to build on past successes and to provide strategic leadership to guide NAGT toward new opportunities for growth.

To learn more about the position and instructions to apply, visit this website.

David McConnell Publishes Article on InTeGrate in Earth MagazineDavid McConnell of North Carolina State University published an article on InTeGrate in the latest issue of Earth magazine. Titled, "Making the first (and last) geoscience class count," the article calls attention to opportunities within introductory geoscience courses to address grand societal challenges that are rooted in the geosciences, thus helping students develop "an appreciation for the global perspective, cultural sensitivity and scientific insight that inform decisions regarding the challenges humans will face in the future."

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GSA supports On the Cutting Edge

The mission of The Geological Society of America is to advance geoscience research and discovery, service to society, stewardship of Earth, and the geosciences profession. We support geoscience education at every level. Join us at http://www.geosociety.org/

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Join today and your membership will help ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators. Join NAGT today

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Your membership is helping to ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators.